Twitter Feed Using Php

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

To start off the year, I’ll post something that I’ve been using a lot in the last month or so for a few sites that I’ve built.

A few years ago, Twitter ended support for their 1.0 API and all twitter feeds across the net began to crash if they weren’t updated to the new 1.1 API. I remember that day well because years past clients were calling wondering why their twitter feeds were no longer working. Naturally, if I were under a maintenance contract they would have been fixed prior to the API changes.

Below is a quick and easy snippet for getting your twitter feed to work using the 1.1 API and OAuth. To use this you’ll need to login to Twitter and create an app, then enter your app information in the token and key areas.

	$token = '[YOUR TOKEN FROM THE APP SETTINGS]';
	$token_secret = '[YOUR TOKEN SECRET FROM THE APP SETTINGS]';
	$consumer_key = '[YOUR CONSUMER KEY FROM THE APP SETTINGS]';
	$consumer_secret = '[YOUR CONSUMER SECRET FROM THE APP SETTINGS]';

	$host = 'api.twitter.com';
	$method = 'GET';
	$path = '/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json'; // api call path

	$query = array( // query parameters
	    'screen_name' => '[ENTER YOUR TWITTER USERNAME HERE]',
	    'count' => '1' // How many tweets do you want to show?
	);

	$oauth = array(
	    'oauth_consumer_key' => $consumer_key,
	    'oauth_token' => $token,
	    'oauth_nonce' => (string)mt_rand(), // a stronger nonce is recommended
	    'oauth_timestamp' => time(),
	    'oauth_signature_method' => 'HMAC-SHA1',
	    'oauth_version' => '1.0'
	);

	$oauth = array_map("rawurlencode", $oauth); // must be encoded before sorting
	$query = array_map("rawurlencode", $query);

	$arr = array_merge($oauth, $query); // combine the values THEN sort

	asort($arr); // secondary sort (value)
	ksort($arr); // primary sort (key)

	// http_build_query automatically encodes, but our parameters
	// are already encoded, and must be by this point, so we undo
	// the encoding step
	$querystring = urldecode(http_build_query($arr, '', '&'));

	$url = "https://$host$path";

	// mash everything together for the text to hash
	$base_string = $method."&".rawurlencode($url)."&".rawurlencode($querystring);

	// same with the key
	$key = rawurlencode($consumer_secret)."&".rawurlencode($token_secret);

	// generate the hash
	$signature = rawurlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base_string, $key, true)));

	// this time we're using a normal GET query, and we're only encoding the query params
	// (without the oauth params)
	$url .= "?".http_build_query($query);

	$oauth['oauth_signature'] = $signature; // don't want to abandon all that work!
	ksort($oauth); // probably not necessary, but twitter's demo does it

	// also not necessary, but twitter's demo does this too
	function add_quotes($str) { return '"'.$str.'"'; }
	$oauth = array_map("add_quotes", $oauth);

	// this is the full value of the Authorization line
	$auth = "OAuth " . urldecode(http_build_query($oauth, '', ', '));

	// if you're doing post, you need to skip the GET building above
	// and instead supply query parameters to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS
	$options = array( CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array("Authorization: $auth"),
	                  //CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $postfields,
	                  CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
	                  CURLOPT_URL => $url,
	                  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
	                  CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false);

	// do our business
	$feed = curl_init();
	curl_setopt_array($feed, $options);
	$json = curl_exec($feed);
	curl_close($feed);

	$twitter_data = json_decode($json);

	function linkify_tweet($twitter_data) {

		//Convert urls to <a> links
		$twitter_data = preg_replace("/([\w]+\:\/\/[\w-?&;#~=\.\/\@]+[\w\/])/", "<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"$1\">$1</a>", $twitter_data);

		//Convert hashtags to twitter searches in <a> links
		$twitter_data = preg_replace("/#([A-Za-z0-9\/\.]*)/", "<a target=\"_new\" href=\"http://twitter.com/search?q=$1\">#$1</a>", $twitter_data);

		//Convert attags to twitter profiles in <a> links
		$twitter_data = preg_replace("/@([A-Za-z0-9\/\.]*)/", "<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.twitter.com/$1\">@$1</a>", $twitter_data);

		return $twitter_data;

	}

/* 	print_r($twitter_data); */

// Use the print_r above to view all of the twitter settings and data that you want to use

Below is a basic example of how you would parse the twitter data using the code above.

<div id="tweet">
	<div class="row">
		<div class="large-10 columns tweet-wrap">
			<span class="date"><?php 

						$date = new DateTime($twitter_data[0]->created_at);
						$date->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));
						$formatted_date = $date->format('M d, Y');
						echo $formatted_date;			

			?></span><br>
			<span class="tweet-text"><?php echo linkify_tweet($twitter_data[0]->text); ?></span>
			<div class="intents">
				<span class="reply"><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to=<?php echo $twitter_data[0]->id; ?>"><i class="fi-arrow-left small"></i> Reply</a></span>
				<span class="retweet"><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=<?php echo $twitter_data[0]->id; ?>"><i class="fi-loop small"></i> Retweet</a></span>					<span class="favorite"><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/favorite?tweet_id=<?php echo $twitter_data[0]->id; ?>"><i class="fi-star small"></i> Favorite</a></span>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

You may need to download the OAuth code from here: https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth/tree/master/src